Educators Embrace Technology to Verify Digital Resource Quality

Lauren Stokes, the Virtual Library Manager at the Las Vegas-Clark County Library, works to ensure that the 1.2 million people served by the twenty-five libraries in her county not only have access to but are using the district’s investment of digital resources.

To accomplish her goal, Stokes first had to convince educators and customers the library’s digital offerings were of the same quality as its print collection. Convincing educators and students the library’s databases were equivalent to its print materials would turn into a multi-year effort. Ironically, the same technology educators were initially skeptical of would ultimately be what persuaded them to become digital advocates.

Stokes credits an innovative feature for converting educators into advocates of Cengage Learning’s Gale suite of products, a cloud-based offering that provides digital content, tools, and services to libraries. “The ability to actually see the book was key…. When that feature came out, teachers and students could actually see the book and realized the digital version they were looking at was the same thing as the print version on the shelf.”

The innovation, combined with an outreach effort aimed at educating schools about the library’s digital resources, resulted in an avalanche of support and dramatically increased usage. Stokes now routinely sees monthly usage spikes when students are assigned big homework projects.

In this Gale success story, you’ll learn how Gale’s suite of products have helped educators and library users discover that digital content can be just as good as what they’d find in the library’s physical collection.